An Eclectic Journal of Opinion, History, Poetry and General Bloviating

Saturday, October 1, 2016

The Elaine Massacre of 1919—Bullets for Sharecroppers

Local officials rallied whites to form a posse to avenge the death of a deputy sheriff outside a rural church were sharecroppers we holding a union meeting. The posse soon became a drunken mob on a human hunt.

1919 was a hell of a year in America.In the wake of World War I long pent up
tensionsboiled to the surface
from coast to coast.The decades long openclass war between the employing
class and the workers who demanded justice and equity through their labor unions which had been on partial abatement during war effort, reignited with a
vengeance.Bloody strikes erupted across the country—in the steel industry of the Northeast
and Midwest; Chicago streetcar operators; harbor
workers, tailors, tobacco workers, painters, streetcar operators in New York City, Western miners and lumberjacks, even Boston Police.The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) despite being suppressed during the War and subject to nation-wide raids that summer was spreading a revolutionary brand of unionism, but even the stodgy American Federation of Labor (AFL) under pressure from their members
was assuming a startling newmilitancy.Many workers took heart from the revolution in Russia—a General Strike closed Seattle and unions formed a soviet to manage it.

Employers, government, and the press reacted with predictable hysteria and a heavy
hand.The great Red Scare on and with it the greatest
repression of dissent, personal, and civil rights in American history conducted by every level of government and law enforcement from the fledgling Bureau of Investigation of the U.S. Justice Department, through state
police and militia, down to municipal police, and county sheriff’s posses—all frequently working hand in glove with company gun thugs and vigilante mobs.Workers were shot, beaten, and tear gassed.They were locked out of jobs and fired
en masse, replaced with scabs.They were kidnapped and forced to rungauntlets. Thousands were rounded
up and jailed.Hundreds deported.

At
the same time long suppressedracial tensions exploded.In cities like Chicago, Knoxville, and Washington,
DC where Southern Blacks had flocked to find war work, the post-war recession pited the new
arrivals against White workers.Deadly race riots broke out with White
mobs attacking any Black they could find, burning neighborhoods and businesses.In the South
there was a resurgence of resistance to
the imposition of Jim Crow laws
which had been restricting every aspect
of black civic and economic life
since the end of Reconstruction.When thousands of Black combat veterans of the Great War arrived back home they were less willing to bow down to White supremacy and many became leaders
of resistance in their communities.This
terrified the Southern White establishment.Lynching and night riding were on the rise as were wild rumors of Black insurrections that planned to kill all whites.

All
of these forces came together in an Arkansas
back water, a rural Delta cotton
belt enclave where Blackshare croppers out-numbered the White farmers who employed them 40-1.On October 1, 1919 hundreds of members of a hastily raised posse and unorganized
mobs from surrounding counties and from across the River in Mississippi began
roaming the country around Elaine in Phillips Countyhunting and
shooting down Blacks of all ages and sexes.The hunt continued for three days.Battle
hardened Federal Troops called in to quell
a “Black Insurrection” and separate and disarm both sides, joined
in the general mayhem, adding a
touch of military efficiency to the
operation.

The
total Black death toll remains
unknown but was at least 100and
local account put it at closer to 250 based on those who disappeared and were never
found.Hundreds more were arrested,
held in a virtual concentration camp until
122 were indicted.Twelve of these were sentenced todeath by hanging.

Black sharecroppers were held in virtual bondage by debts to plantation stores when payments for crops were delayed for months and made without any accounting of the final price of the cotton they raised or a detailed account of their debts. In desperation, the Progressive Farmers and Household Union was formed.

Things
had always been tough for share croppers in the Delta.But they were getting worse.The main problem was getting the settlements due them for the crops they raised for their
landlords.The land owners took the cotton to market without the
sharecroppers present.They sold it when convenient—often delaying months hoping from prices to rise—and
would not pay their tenants until after that, or when convenient.Meanwhile tenants with no other source of
income borrowed against their crop
to make purchases of necessities at stores that accepted script, often
owned by the farmers themselves.By Arkansas law a share cropper could not leave his land until this debt
was paid.

The
1918 crops had generally gone to market in October.Most sharecroppers in the area were not paid
until the following July meaning extra months of borrowing.Also the plantation
owners generally did not provide
either proof of the price paid on delivery, or itemized bills of what was owned from the stores.Sharecroppers were at the mercy of their
landlords and held in something very close to slavery.

Local
sharecroppers, spurred on by recently returned veterans began meeting
secretly in the area during the late summer to discuss their options.They boiled down to two:a class
action law suit against the owners or the formation of some kind ofunion.A law suit—even if the poor sharecroppers
could find a lawyer—would be expensive, take a longtime to resolve exposing
the plaintiffs to retaliation by the
landlords, and have little chance of
success in Arkansas courts.Organizing a union would be dangerous, but solidarity might offer some
protection from retribution.They
hoped.

Robert L. Hill of Winchester, Arkansas, himself a Black
tenant farmer, had organized the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of
America.Several lodges were secretly formed
that summer in the Elaine area.In
addition to representing the tenant farmers, it also sought to represent their wives
and daughters who worked as cooks, maids, wet nurses, and “mammies”
in plantation homes and in the homes of other local Whites.

The meeting called at Hoop
Spur Church three
miles from Elaine on September 29 was just the latest of the meetings.About 100 sharecroppers crowded into the
remote church building.Organizers were
aware that by now the Plantation owners had gotten wind of what was afoot.As a precaution against
nightriders, armed guards were
posted outside the building.

As
the meeting was going on inside three men, Deputy
Sheriff Charles Pratt; W. A. Adkins,
a Missouri-Pacific Railroaddetective, and a Black trustee from the Phillips
County Jail, pulled up in a car outside the church.Some sort of confrontation
occurred between the White men and the Black armed guards.A gunfight
erupted.Who fired the first shot is
unknown.In the end it didn’t even make
a difference. When it was over Pratt was dead,
Adkins wounded and the trustee was fleeing on foot to the County Seat at Helena.Knowing what was inevitably coming, the meeting quickly broke up and attendees scattered to their homes,
many preparing to flee the area.

By
the next morning the Phillips County Sheriff organized a posse to arrest or kill anyone involved in the meeting and
shooting.The core posse was made up of
local plantation owners, their overseers
and White employees, local businessmen, and what lay-a-bouts could be quickly
rounded up.As the day wore on,
fueled by wild rumors and lurid newspaper headlines, hundreds more armed men
poured into the area from surrounding counties and nearby Mississippi.If the posse had ever truly been a law
enforcement body under the control of the Sheriff, it quickly deteriorated into a raving mob.

Lurid press accounts spread white panic.

It
was a hunting party.Blacks were shot
down in their homes, whole families
murdered.Many more chased down as they tried to escape on foot.Some were armed and there was occasional
resistance.Five members of the mob
were killed, but some of those were apparently struck by shots from their
friends, many of whom had been drinking
heavily through the day and following night.

County
authorities wired Governor Charles
Hillman Brough for troops to
help suppress a supposed insurrection.Brough was a Wilson progressive and
like the President a former college professor with a PhD.He also echoed the Wilson administration’s near hysteria over the Red
menace.In a speech in St. Louis during the War he said, “there
existed no twilight zone in American patriotism” and called Wisconsin Senator Robert LaFollete, who
opposed the war, a Bolshevik leader.And he was an unabashed supporter of the Jim Crow system.

Brough
pressed the War Department for
troops, which somewhat reluctantly
agreed to dispatch 500 men from Camp
Pike near Little Rock.Most were Arkansas men awaiting discharge thus they were rather loosely organized for camp life, not in the cohesive units they were used to in
France and serving under officers with
whom they were unfamiliar and whom, as we shall see, soon lost control of the men.

Army Col. Isaak Jenks and Arkansas Governor Charles Hillman Brough arrive in Elaine with Federal troops as members of the mob look on. The Army was supposed to disarm both side. Instead troops simply joined the hunt.

The
troops arrived on the scene during the day of October 2.Their official mission was to disarm and
separate both sides and assist in the arrest of the perpetrators of a riot and
members of an insurrectionary cabal.Many members of the mob were exhausted
anyway and began to drift home, but
others continued to arrive and join in the hunt.The troops, who were fed frightening rumors, joined the hunt themselves.Colonel
Isaac Jenks, commander of the U.S. troops at Elaine, officially reported
two Blacks killed by his troops, but the Memphis Press on reported that “Many Negroes are reported
killed by the soldiers….”

This
was later confirmed by an account by
Sharpe Dunaway, of the Arkansas Gazettein 1925 who recalled that
soldiers, “committed one murder after another with all the calm
deliberation in the world, either too heartless to realize the enormity of
their crimes, or too drunk on moonshine to give a continental darn.”

At
least the troops were more efficient than the posse/mob in making arrests.Over the next few days they rounded up
hundreds of men, just about every still
breathing Black man they could find, and placed them in an improvised bull pen near Helena.The troops conducted “intense interrogation of the suspects” which often amounted to beatings, torture, and threats to family members.

Meanwhile
the Southern press was having a field
day passing on the wildest of rumors.A headline in the Arkansas Gazette
on October 3 screamed, “Negros Plan to Kill All Whites:Slaughter was to Begin with 21 Prominent Men.”E. M.
Allen, a planter and real estate
developer who became the spokesman
for Phillips County’s white power
structure, told the Helena World on October 7, “The present
trouble with the Negroes in Phillips County is not a race riot. It is a
deliberately planned insurrection of the Negroes against the whites directed by
an organization known as the ‘Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America,’
established for the purpose of banding Negroes together for the killing of
white people.”

Even
the New
York Times was not immune from the hysteria.Under a headline that in part read, “Trouble
traced to Socialist Agitators,” the
paper breathlessly reported, “Additional evidence has been obtained of the
activities of propagandists among the Negroes, and it is thought that a plot
existed for a general uprising against the whites.” A white man had been
arrested, the article added, and was “alleged to have been preaching social
equality among the Negroes.”Of course
no such White man was arrested—or ever existed.

The
idea sprang from the assumption that
Blacks were naturally too content with
their lot and too stupid to organize
themselves unless led astray and directed by deviousrevolutionists.

Governor
Brough arrived personally on the scene in the company of the Federal
troops.He consulted with a group of
local leaders designated the Committee
of Seven who passed on every rumor that they heard, or made up.The Governor appointed the same men to lead
his own “investigation” not into what happened or the response to it, but on
how to prevent future insurrections.The
Governor told the press, “The situation at Elaine has been well handled and is
absolutely under control. There is no danger of any lynching…. The white
citizens of the county deserve unstinting praise for their actions in
preventing mob violence.”

Violence
wound down after three days, although there were sporadic shootings later, and more men were arrested when found in hiding.Official estimates of the number of Blacks
killed hovered around 100.Local
residents believed that the number was two to three times that.No one will ever know for sure.Most of the dead were buried quietly by their families, by who ever found their bodies,
or mass unmarked graves dug by the
troops.

Over
the next few days some men who were vouched
for by their employers were released from the bullpen.285 were then transferred to the county jail,
which had a capacity of only 40.More
torture was conducted, according to sworn affidavits by two posse members, T. K. Jones and H. F. Smiddy, in 1921, to extract
confessions.

The twelve sharecroppers originally convicted and sentenced to be electrocuted.

October
31, 1919, the Phillips County Grand Jury
indicted 122 of the prisoners on charges ranging from murder to, without
apparent irony, night riding, a
hang-over statue from the Reconstruction Era, aimed at the Ku Klux Klan. The trials began the next week. White attorneys from
Helena were appointed by Circuit Judge
J. M. Jackson to represent the first twelve black men to go to trial.
Attorney Jacob Fink, who was appointed to representFrank Hicks, admitted to the jury that he had
not interviewed any witnesses. He made no motion for a change of venue, nor did he challenge
a single prospective juror, taking the first twelve called. By November 5,
1919, the first twelve black men given trials had been convicted of murder and sentenced to die in the electric chair. As a result, sixty-five
others quickly entered plea-bargains
and accepted sentences of up to
twenty-one years for second-degree
murder. Others had their charges dismissed
or ultimately were not prosecuted.

Meanwhile
the case had stirred the attention of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People, NAACP, the leading, and almost only, nationalcivil rights organization.Field Secretary Walter White came to
Elaine personally to investigate, at
great risk to himself.

The NAACP's Walter White risked his life.

White
was mixed race with pale skin, blue eyes, and light hair.He easily passed as a White man.In
this guise he interviewed local leaders and members of the posse and then met secretly with the families of those
in jail and with some men in hiding.Word leaked out that there was a High
Yellow from up North snooping around.White was warned and got on a train where a conductor confided in him about a, “damned yellow nigger passing for white and the boys
are going to get him…when they get through with him he won’t pass for white no
more!”

As
soon as he was safely in the North
White wrote articles which were published in the Chicago Daily News, which had provided him with the press credentials he used to interview
White leaders; the Chicago Defender, the nation’s leading Black newspaper;The Nation, and the NAACP’s magazineThe Crisis.It
was the first time the sharecroppers’s
side of the story was told along with revelations of the bloody massacre
and persecution.Local authorities tried
to have both the Defender and The Crisis banned from the mails.

The NAACP launched
a massive drive for a defense fund
to handle appeals of the convicted
men.They obtained as co-counselScipio
Africanus Jones,
Arkansas’s leading Black attorney and eighty year old Colonel George W. Murphy, a Confederate
veteran, former Arkansas Attorney
General, and unsuccessful candidate
for Governor on the Progressive
Partyticket.Despite his age Murphy was considered
still one of the most able men at
the state Bar.

Scipio Africanus Jones defended the convicted men.

The NAACP launched
a massive drive for a defense fund
to handle appeals of the convicted
men.They obtained as co-counselScipio
Africanus Jones,
Arkansas’s leading Black attorney and eighty year old Colonel George W. Murphy, a Confederate
veteran, former Arkansas Attorney
General, and unsuccessful candidate
for Governor on the Progressive
Partyticket.Despite his age Murphy was considered
still one of the most able men at
the state Bar.

Both
lawyers performed heroically through
a highly complex set of appeals in
both state and Federal courts which
dragged on for years. They won a reversal
of the verdicts by the Arkansas
Supreme Court in six of the twelve death penalty cases on the grounds that the jury had failed to specify whether the
defendants were guilty of murder in the first
or second degree. Those cases were
accordingly sent back for retrial.These six became known as the Ware defendants.

The
Supreme Court upheld the convictions of the other six who became known as the Moore defendants.In those cases the defense lawyers had
argued that the convictions should be set
aside because the use of torture and intimidation violateddue process.

Several
appeals were filed in various courts for both sets of defendants.Appeals in the state courts were uniformly
unsuccessful.The Supreme Court
ultimately ruled that “the defendants' evidence of torture used to obtain
confessions or mob intimidation, but the state simply argued that, even if
true, this did not amount to a denial of due process.”Even a Federal Appeals court agreed.

The
re-trial of the Ware defendants finally began on May 3, 1920. During the
trials, Murphy became ill, and Jones became the principal counsel. Jones faced enormous hostility, including court room packed with armed White men.He had to sleep secretly at a different
black family’s house every night during the trials. Not unexpectedly
despite his best efforts all six were convicted
again and once more sentenced to death.However Gov. Brough stayed their
executions until the Arkansas Supreme Court could again review the cases.
Ultimately, the Ware defendants were freed by the Arkansas Supreme Court after two terms of court had passed.No attempt was made to retry the men.

Meanwhile
the case of the Moore defendant finally landed in the United States Supreme Courtwhich ruled that the original
proceedings had been a mask, and
that the state of Arkansas had not provided a corrective process that would have allowed the defendants to vindicate
their constitutional right to due process of law on appeal. The High Court
sent the case back to the State for a new hearing taking due process into
account.

Beyond
the immediate effect on the case, the Court decision was a landmark—for the first time it held that the Federal Constitutional protection of due
process applied to the States as
well and that Federal courts had jurisdiction
to enforce it.Almost all subsequent
civil rights cases before the court and many criminal cases were heard under
this new standard.

Back
in Arkansas Jones concluded that even with the order, a fair trial could not be
obtained.But the State itself was growing weary of the complicated and expensive litigation and of mounting criticism from around the
country.Jones elected to save his remaining clients by making a
deal.In March of 1923 the men pled guilty to second-degree murder and
were sentenced to five years from the date they were first incarcerated in the
Arkansas State Penitentiary.

Finally,
on January 14, 1925, Governor Thomas
McRae in his last hours in office before a sworn member of the Ku Klux Klan would take his place ordered the
release of the Moore defendants by granting them indefinite
furloughs.Jones arranged for them
to be released under cover of darkness
and immediately taken out of state,
safely away from expected lynch mobs,

Within
a month, Jones also obtained the release of the other defendants who had pled
guilty or been convicted of lesser offenses.

Unlike
other famous racial atrocities like
the Tulsa race riot.Attempts to reconcile the Black and White
communities around Elaine have failed.Many, if not most, local White residents, descendants of participants in the posses, mob, and trials, still
believe that there was going to be a bloody resurrection and that their forbearers acted nobly and bravely to save their community.

A 2000
a conference on held at the Delta
Cultural Center in Helena was acrimonious
and bitter.